Brian Aldiss - This World and Nearer Ones

As for a work designed to counterbalance the optimism of the Enlightenment, Malthus’s influential Essay on Population , its message that poverty and starvation, and more poverty and starvation, was mankind’s lot, added little to the gaiety of nations. Fortunately, in the New World, the wide prairies of the Mid-West seemed to give the lie to Malthus; in many ways, the United States could escape from the gloomy prognostications of Europe.

In Europe, the century culminated in a general pessimism (brought on, it must be added, by a series of dire events, revolutions and wars, as much as by depressing books). Great inventions, too, brought inventive whispers of mortality. I mentioned photography in my introduction. Photography brings us news of distant places; it sometimes appears, through the medium of the cinema screen, to bring us light itself, clothed in images of majestic beauty. Yet its primary use – at least among ordinary people – is to record ourselves and our families, and thus to expose as never before the ageing process, the heat death of the individual, to the very generations who have lost belief in the consolations of the Hereafter.

Photography is comfortless (Susan Sontag has recently made perceptive remarks on this score). It gives a twist to the Enlightenment philosopher Berkeley’s new theory of vision. ‘The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived,’ said Berkeley. Now we have become so enslaved by our cameras that we hardly exist unless we have been perceived by the lens; I have known functions to be called off because the television cameras were not coming – therefore the event was not important enough, even in the eyes of its participants, and ceased to exist.

In the nineteenth century, as now, the sketchy frameworks of possibility expanded at exhilarating speed. Yet the new light fell only on the old darkness of the human condition. The physical laws of the universe were disclosed as conveying less warmth than a kindly Providence.

In the autocratic societies of Enlightenment Europe, it mattered not what the common people thought. They had their own hand-down folk culture; new things were for the learned, the élite, whose opinions both had influence and could be influenced. After the American and French revolutions, that situation changed. Nineteenth-century Europe seethed with populist movements. In democratic societies, the people have influence, and so must be influenced. It was necessary to disseminate the grand gloomy ideas which had originated through science (science itself had suddenly become democratic, not to mention riddled with socialists). The people must learn to rule as well as being ruled.

Means of dissemination of ideas were provided by technological developments. All things conspired to the swifter propagation of information, from mechanical inventions such as the development of the rotary press, to repeals of newspaper tax and the abolition of excise duty on paper, to the establishment of municipal libraries and public museums. The Victorian Age spawned penny encyclopaedias and many factual publications, whilst nourishing the growth of the novel which – in England at least – had appeared defunct in the decade when Queen Victoria came to the throne.

Grand gloomy ideas do not necessarily make headway in a period of euphoric advancement such as the early Victorians enjoyed. ‘We are on the side of Progress,’ said Macaulay. The novelists, chasing other goals than philosophy, established the novel as a great social force and as a social form. The forte of the novel was the portrayal of character striving with character within society. Balzac or Zola, Mrs Gaskell or Trollope, Dostoevsky or Turgenev, this was the novelist’s territory. And this, by the way, was the territory on which the newly arrived literary critics based their activities.

Complacency is always on the side of Progress. William Morris, near the end of the century, talks of ‘the Whig frame of mind, natural to the modern prosperous middle-class men, who, in fact, so far as mechanical progress is concerned, have nothing to ask for’. The first novelists to attempt evolutionary themes and essay the grand gloomy ideas were three autodidacts, Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells.

To call Butler an autodidact is to exaggerate. He was of the prosperous middle class, his father being a canon of Lincoln, and he was educated at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. But he repudiated his father’s religion and influence, becoming virtually a different man by leaving home for New Zealand, where he farmed sheep. In New Zealand, he began his literary career, the fruits of which are noted for their anti-Christian and unorthodox flavour – foremost among them being Erewhon (1872).

One can see that Erewhon is not science fiction; one can also see how in crossing of some mysterious many ways it resembles science fiction. An imaginary journey, the crossing of some mysterious barrier (in this case mountains), and the discovery of another society with attendant marvels – these are the common stock alike of the medieval romance and of modern science fiction. Erewhon also has negative attributes which distance it from the ordinary novel. The central figure is solitary, a corollary of which is that there is no great emotional depth in the story; and human psychology is not a strong element of the design, which focuses instead on what is new, unknown. What is new and unknown is embodied in a series of brilliant ideas, brilliantly handled in a satirical way which reminds us somewhat of Peacock or, to look forward, Aldous Huxley. These ideas stem in the main from Darwinism, a subject to which Butler devoted several books.

Thomas Hardy attended Darwin’s funeral. His sombre imagination was fired by the misty stretches of landscape revealed by evolutionary thought.

We do not read Hardy for his ideas, thought they are present – the ideas of a dreamer more than an intellectual; we may read him as the novelist of countryside now largely vanished, though Hardy could scarcely distinguish one flower from another. In fact, what is most compelling in the Wessex novels is the struggle at all levels between traditional and disruptive new ways of thought. More directly, an evolutionary emphasis is present from the early novels to – and climaxing in – The Dynasts (1903), Hardy’s great para-historical drama with an evolving Immanent Will.

The case of H.G.Wells, who was taught by Darwin’s friend and ally, Thomas Huxley, is too familiar to need examination here. Like Hardy, Wells got his education where he could, and taught himself by teaching. His brilliant entry into the literary field marks the con- gruence of two grand gloomy ideas, evolution crossed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Time Machine (1895). The Time Machine is distinctively science fiction in the way that The Dynasts distinctively is not. Indeed, it is science fiction in a way that much later science fiction is not – not only does it contain new ideas, but it combines them in a new way. Small wonder that it has been the exemplar of much that followed.

The Island of Dr Moreau , published the year after The Time Machine , shows Wells again worrying the bone of evolution. Wells himself pointed to its similarities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . And he says, ‘I have never been able to get away from life in the mass and life in general as distinguished from life in the individual experience, in any book I have ever written.’ This viewpoint of Man as Statistic, typical of many an SF writer, is encouraged by Malthusian thought. Wells and Hardy and Butler, being outside the swim of middle-class society, had little to lose by a new approach; it came naturally to them to express what was not received wisdom, and to propagate the unpopular. With the unpopular, Wells caught the popular ear.